Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [200]
The summer of 1983 was an unrewarding time to be writing movie criticism. Her review of Flashdance could easily have been interpreted by some Hollywood insiders as an open attack on the man who produced it, Don Simpson—but it is doubtful that Pauline would have liked the film no matter who happened to be at the helm. She trounced it as a “lulling, narcotizing musical; the whole damn thing throbs. It’s a motorized anatomy lesson, designed to turn the kids on and drive older men crazy. It’s soft-core porn with an inspirational message, and it’s maybe the most calculating, platinum-hearted movie I’ve ever seen.” She welcomed Woody Allen back, guardedly, with her review of Zelig, his documentary satire about a chameleon-like personality who inserts himself into the lives of many of the great figures of the century. She felt it was a small success that had been wildly overrated: “The film has a real shine, but it’s like a teeny carnival that you may have missed—it was in the yard behind the Methodist Church last week.”
That fall, she enjoyed herself tremendously at Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the marketing of Project Mercury’s groundbreaking team of astronauts. She wrote that the entire film gave off “a pleasurable hum” and that “like Tom Wolfe, Phil Kaufman wants you to find everything he puts in beguilingly wonderful and ironic. That’s the Tom Wolfe tone, and to a surprising degree Kaufman catches it and blends it with his own.” What intrigued her most was the way in which Kaufman, “far more of an anti-establishmentarian than Tom Wolfe,” had taken the book’s “reactionary cornerstone: the notion that a man’s value is determined by his physical courage . . . Yet the film’s comedy scenes are conceived in counterculture terms.”
Years later, Kaufman still wasn’t certain about Pauline’s term “reactionary cornerstone.” “Someone told me she saw it with a group of her followers,” he said, “and I don’t know if that was a Pauline reaction, purely. The movie was all about the wives and female courage, and all of these things—women holding up. Every scene in the movie was an aspect of the right stuff. It wasn’t all about macho stuff. In fact, a lot of it was downplaying that. Pauline saw a movie once and sometimes she might see it in a mood or with certain people and the mood of the room—and you just have to live with that. I would never think of calling Pauline to try to explain my work to her.”
She was delighted by Barbra Streisand’s directorial debut with Yentl, released in November. She thought the movie “rhapsodic,” and a welcome musical return to the screen for the star. “Her singing voice takes you farther into the character; the songs express Yentl’s feelings—what she wants to say but has to hold back,” Pauline wrote. “Her singing is more than an interior monologue. When she starts a song, her hushed intensity makes you want to hear her every breath, and there’s high drama in her transitions from verse to chorus.” Pauline had always resented that Streisand had in the past come under fire for her perfectionism, and toward the end of the review, her partisanship came glaring through: “And now that she has made her formal debut as a director, her work explains why she, notoriously, asks so many questions of writers and directors and everyone else—that’s her method of learning. And it also explains why she has sometimes been unhappy with her directors: she really did know better.”
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